Mother's Day: If We Can Make You Feel Guilty, You'll Give Us Your Money

Note: If you have a perfect relationship with your mother and your children and love Mother's Day beyond all else, please don't read this. Please accept my best wishes for a fabulous day, and go have cupcakes (preferably ones from Gigi's Cupcakes; I recommend this one, which makes me salivate just looking at the photo).

If, however, this time of year isn't your favorite, for whatever reason, this might be for you.

This time of year, when all the stores are full of Mother's Day stuff and every ad is designed to make you feel guilty enough about your relationship with your mother that you'll spend extra money to make up for not calling often enough or not going to medical school when she wanted you to or not picking up your room without a temper tantrum, I always think of all the people for whom the whole flowery idea of Motherhood as Perfection just doesn't work. They show you ads about how everyone has this fabulous relationship with their mother, implying that that's the norm. So what's wrong with you?

Now, my mother was a good mother. She loved me, she took care of me, she taught me all kinds of things. But was our relationship perfect? Good lord, no. She suffered from suicidal depression. She refused to meet The EGE until after we'd been married for many years, and even though she adored him after that, she had her issues. At the end of her life she refused to see a black doctor because, she said, she couldn't allow him to touch her. So you can kind of imagine, between her beliefs and my constant worry about her mental health. We loved each other, but we were not friends, and I spent way too much time mourning that, thinking that everyone else had this amazing relationship with their mom and that somehow I had failed because I didn't. Because my mother was a good mother, it must have been my fault, some lack me that kept us from shopping together and going to lunch and sharing secrets and taking road trips and all the things I imagined other women did with their mothers. If I'd moved closer to her, or married someone else, or had kids, or gotten a better degree and a fancy job and spent more time with her and, and, and. . . .

I know I'm not alone in having a less-than-perfect relationship with my mother, and I resent the advertising that implies that I am, that everyone else's mother is their very best friend. Yes, I know people whose mother IS their best friend, and I think that's wonderful. No, I don't envy them, because if my mother had been my best friend, now I wouldn't have one, since she's dead. So that wouldn't have worked out so well for me now, would it? And I know now, of course, that there are millions of other women whose relationships with their mothers make them feel guilty for what they imagine it should be/should have been. And all those people who had fabulous relationships with their mothers but whose mothers are now dead, meaning that all the Mother's Day hoopla makes them feel more than a little sad. As in totally depressed and filled with misery.

And now a digression about the Cult of Motherhood:

Facebook is full of these pop-up ads about "Midland mom discovers--" and then whatever:  ways to get whiter teeth or a flat belly or cheap shoes or whatever. As if including the words "Midland" (because that's where I live, so I'll believe anything they say happens here) and "mom" because we all know that motherhood bestows both infinite knowledge and sainthood, means we'll believe whatever-it-is.

Our buying into the Cult of Motherhood baffles me, because we all have known horrible mothers, women who had no business reproducing and who made the lives of their offspring miserable, if not a total living hell. With few exceptions, everyone has the physical ability to reproduce. That doesn't mean they *should,* and that doesn't mean that, if they do, they'll make a good parent. Just because you are a mother doesn't mean you're good at it, and implying that every woman who gives birth is a saint is ridiculous. That would mean that every girl child is a saint, since she may become a mother at some point, and the act of giving birth doesn't confer instant sainthood, I'm thinking, because we tend to think pregnant women are pretty saintly. So it must happen earlier, and why not before birth, when those eggs, the potential for reproduction, are already present? So all girls are already saints. And what about fathers? Don't they get to be saints? And if so, then all boys must be saints, too. And so every single human must be saint except those of us who 1) never reproduced and 2) are now past the age when that would have been possible. But wait! If we had the potential to be mothers, and so were saints, at what point was that stripped from us? See? It all gets a little silly.

And I haven't even mentioned anything about women who have children and abandon them, abuse them, torture them, kill them. They're mothers, too, no matter how we'd like to pretend they're not, that they're some other creature entirely.

So this glorification of motherhood is a little suspect. It's advertising. And it works because we all feel a little guilty, either because we had a great mother for whom we feel we haven't done enough or because we had a lousy mother and we have always suspected it was at least partly our fault.

I think of this every year at this time, when it's all about motherhood everywhere and, for so many people, it's stirring up feelings of sadness and loss, regret and guilt, bad memories and lost opportunities, all designed to make you feel bad so you'll spend money. Don't feel guilty. If you want to buy your mom a card, take her out to lunch, great. If all you want to do is send a card, that's fine, too. You don't even have to do that. You don't "owe" your mother anything. Sure, she may have done a lot for you. Most mothers do, in various ways. But that is as it should be: she chose to give birth to you, and that's what mothers of all species are supposed to do for their offspring:  take care of them and raise them to independence. So don't beat yourself up for not "repaying" her. That's not your job. My own mother, who was a staunch supporter of Planned Parenthood and believed firmly that, even back in the 1960s, there were way, way, too many babies being born, always said there were no unselfish reasons for having a child. The world doesn't need any more people; there are no compelling reasons to bring babies into the world. If a woman chooses to do that, it's for her own reasons, and those are by definition selfish. No, do not whinge at me about this. I know all the arguments, and I know mothers want to believe they're having children for altruistic reasons, but please: with 6,916,707,699 people currently vying for the Earth's rapidly-diminishing resources, you know that isn't true. So having children is a personal choice, made for personal reasons, but they're not unselfish reasons, and no woman has the right to make her children feel guilty or indebted to her for that choice. Your relationship with your mother is unique, and no one else can judge it or judge you because of it.

We have relationships in our lives. Ideally, those would be good relationships, fulfilling relationships with people we love and who love us. We would be nice to each other and do things to make each other feel good as often as possible. We're adults, right? So do we really need a day when businesses across the land join together to try to convince us that we haven't done enough, been enough, loved enough--and that this Sunday, by golly, we'd better do something to make up for it? And that that *something* had better involve lots of money?

No, we don't. It's simple: Be nice to the people you care about. Let them know they're important to you. Don't feel guilty for anything--if you feel you haven't treated someone well, change. If you owe them an apology, suck it up and apologize. If you need to distance yourself, that's your right. If you want to give them a present, by all means, give presents. Presents are fabulous! Give a present to your kid because it's May. Give a present to your partner because it's raining. Give a present to your sister because you found something you know she'll like. Give a present to your mom or your dad or a favorite aunt because you made it by hand and they'll adore it. Give a present to your friend because he deserves a Gift of Spring.

But don't give in to the corporations' concerted efforts to make you feel guilty about whatever relationship you have, or had, with your mother. No matter how hard they try to convince you otherwise, everyone else's relationship with their moms isn't perfect. You're not a failure. We're human. We do our best.

So go. Enjoy the weekend. Ignore the pressure. Be nice to each other. Hug someone.

XO